The Vincent Van Goo pasties, and the Snuggies Series, first appeared on Aby.com. You can still find them, including the artist’s newer work, across the internet, including on Fetlife and Tumblr.
FROM CWIS:
It’s important to remember that, back then, diaper pictures were few and far in between. Today’s newer ABDLs are so. fucking. spoiled. with their Tumblr ‘feed’ allowing for literally non-stop scrolling through padded shot after padded shot.
Back then you had to click the links one at a time, and then wait for them to load.
Some would get halfway there, loading from nose to navel, and then stop. Others would open to a big red ‘X’. But, if I was lucky, I’d have a whole bunch of new ABDL pics to perv to.
Most of the pictures were of random guys wearing diapers, including fraternity baby shots, Halloween shots, and other pics which clearly weren't AB/DL related.
There were a few pictures of actual ABDLs, but you had to work hard to find them.
Which is why the VanGoo pasties were so welcome…
Ahh, the Vincent VanGoo pasties series.
These were, for my collegiate fapping needs, where it was at.
Sure, the ‘Van Goo Collection’ were primarily pictures of guys who weren't actually in diapers... but they were hot scenes and, unlike some of the photos in which the subjects really were wearing diapers - with their faces blurred or, worse, covered with black from the MS Paint program - it wasn’t difficult to imagine the subjects of these pasties really wanting to be in the diapers they were sporting.
Or, even hotter, not wanting to be diapered - many of the pictures dealt with themes of humiliation, after all.
The pictures, though fake as fuck, just seemed more... natural.
To the newer members of our community these pasties probably look fake. Back in the late 1990s, though, pictures of actual ABDLs dressed in diapers were in short supply. The VanGoo Series was as real as it got - and they came with adorable little fantasy captions, too.
I'm a very visual person. I appreciate good diaper pictures. And when I discovered them online I was in heaven. But, after a while, it wasn't enough for me to view hotboy diaper pictures on a website and then go on about my day. So I actually - believe it or not - printed out a few dozen of the VanGoo series - on a printer right in the printer lab.
I had a folder at home of fake diaper pictures, and I pulled it out and looked at it often.
A few years later they'd add disc drives, and things got easier.
Today's new crop of diaperboys don't know how easy they have it.
When I hear them complaining because whichever free diaper website they peruse pictures on is a little slow to load I laugh. Back in [XXXX] we had it really rough.
Picture me, in a public computer lab, waiting for fake pictures to load, so slowly, and then waiting for the printer to be free so I could blast it with some pictures for a printout... wtf?
Picture me pulling out a folder of printed black-and-white diaper pictures, and finding fantasy material in the captions - because, at the time, the idea of someone real into diapers seemed like the real fantasy.
So I have to start this Spotlight on Vincent VanGoo, the originator of the pasties series, with a thank you to Mr. VanGoo himself.
Your pictures were the first thing that made me feel "normal" - and I know that I speak for many ABDLs, both younger and older, when I say this.
You faked diaper pictures to make the fetish feel real. And we can't thank you enough...
FROM THE ARTIST: VINCENT VANGOO
I have been a DL from puberty; let’s just say it was a combination of past diaper humiliation as a bedwetter (which made the feeling of a diaper between my legs familiar) and being completely naive about sexuality and masturbation (which meant I didn't know why it felt good) that led me to put on my first diaper at the age of thirteen and rub it until I popped. Because of the childhood humiliation I never fantasized about myself being put back in diapers; I was always crawling into someone else’s headspace and putting them through what I went through…I was being humiliated vicariously, it was safe, and it was fun!
My brother took art classes in high school, so there was tracing paper available, and I put it to good use, making my first real “pasties”. I would start with pages from Sears or Montgomery Ward catalogs of men modeling underwear. Next, I would put a sheet of tracing paper over the picture and trace out the shape of a cloth diaper with pins (which is what I was diapered with as a child). I turned the sheet over and colored the back with white colored pencil, then I cut the shape out with an X-acto knife and taped it to the page. I had to hide the page, of course, so no-one else would know, but it was as close to seeing diapers on a grown man as I’d see for many years.
This was decades before home computers and the internet, and I felt like a freak. Occasionally, I’d hear about a college guy wearing a diaper on Halloween or see some silly show on TV where someone would dress like a baby, but they could never match my fantasies. Any cute-looking, athletic guy I met would end up in one of my diaper fantasies. I never imagined I’d ever meet anyone else like me, although I knew they existed after reading Penthouse Forum. (I bought Penthouse and Playboy in college just to see whether I was attracted to women, and of course they did nothing for me; but I stayed in the closet for decades more for religious reasons, telling myself I didn’t like guys…I just liked diapers.)
In the 1980s, I started looking for other evidence of ABDLs in magazines. Eventually, I came across a fringe culture magazine called the Utne Reader, and there was an ad in the back for “Diaper Pail Fraternity”. I was simultaneously elated and nervous, but I was determined to find out more. I got a post office box and used a fake name (to make it difficult to trace back to me), and I ordered the DPF newsletter…putting cash in an envelope instead of paying by check. What an eye-opener the newsletter was! It was cheaply printed in black and white with low-res photos, but it showed me there was a world of ABDLs out there. And sadly, it showed me that most of them were not quite like me.
There were sissy babies and people who liked using diapers like a baby uses them; there were people who liked them sexually or for watersports and others who found them comforting. On one extreme, there was a man who wanted to have his teeth removed so he could eat like a newborn; on the other extreme, there was me -- who wore diapers occasionally (and masturbated with them frequently) but never used them as a toilet. That’s when I learned the term ABDL and began to understand the full spectrum of what it means. Overall, it was a shock to my senses but I knew that I had to be tolerant of people not like me, if I wanted to eventually meet like-minded people.
In 1996 I bought my first home computer…a screamingly-fast 90mhz Pentium with a colossal 1.2 GB hard drive and a whopping 16 MB of RAM. I had worked as a graphic artist in the 1980s, and I wanted to get back into it, so one of the first programs I bought was Adobe Photoshop, version 3. It didn’t take me long to figure out I could make digital pasties with it!
When I got internet service for the first time (snail-pace dial-up), I started looking for photos of men on the internet to use as subjects for my artistic creations. My first attempts were not particularly spectacular. I found photos of men in their underwear or jockstraps, and I used the Clone tool to “paint” a diaper on them, using the white pixels of their undies. The diapers weren’t always convincing, and the diaper pins were usually too garish to look real. For each picture, I would come up with a caption that I thought suited it.
Occasionally I would do a search on one of the many different search engines (Alta Vista, Yahoo, Webcrawler, Dogpile, etc.) for anything diaper-related. I think DPF was the first ABDL site online that brought the community together. And what a community -- thousands more people than I ever dreamed were into diapers in some way! It was on the DPF site that I posted my first pasties. More and more people began posting their photos, and I was especially inspired by the MarcusA series -- a young man with the build of a football player wearing real diapers…amazing! His photos sparked the idea that I should be making pasties with REAL diaper photos, not just paintings of diapers. So I digitally cut out a few of his diapers and started putting them on photos of other guys. I probably made 150 or so of them before I came up with the idea of creating a fake adult diaper ad starring real men…especially hunky ones. Snuggies was born! From that point on, my pasties were nothing but Snuggies ads, with every conceivable storyline from my vast mental archives of humiliating situations.
I made Snuggies pix whenever I was inspired; in other words, whenever I was horny. Often it was just when I had some free time over a holiday. Although they were made to fuel my own fantasies, I figured there had to be people like me, so I would share them freely on DPF…I mean, even though they were “used”, they were still good!
The ABDL community doesn’t always play well together, and the DPF forums became a battleground of insults. People were leaving DPF and looking for another place to play. ABY.COM to the rescue! I will always fondly remember that site, even though I think Davee, its owner, eventually grew tired of managing the ever-growing stream of users logging into the site. (I helped moderate the photos for the site for several months, and it was exhausting!) Davee was the first to ask me if he could host my Snuggies pix, and I was glad to give them a home with people who could appreciate them. It was Davee who dubbed me “Vincent Vangoo” because of my “clever pixel-twisting”, and I’ve used the moniker since.
Over the years, I’ve gotten a lot of nice comments and compliments from Snuggies fans. Many people have told me the Snuggies pix were their introduction to how hot diapers can look on guys. After honing my Photoshop skills for several years, some of the photos were looking convincingly real. I’ve had many people ask me where they can buy Snuggies and how I got my models to pose for the photos. What a hoot! Of course, I had to spill the beans about them being fakes, but it gave me a warm feeling inside to know my work was convincing. But it’s for this same reason that I’ve had to turn down several requests to make pasties of celebrities -- I don’t want the Enquirer publishing the photos as real and then be taken to court over them! I did a couple of celebs early on, when the diapers were painted on, but I realized it could be trouble so I nipped it in the bud.
I was eventually approached by Todaler, a member of the ABDL community who had long wanted to see someone make an adult diaper that was less institutional and more baby-like, and he asked if he could use the Snuggies name. We came to an agreement, and he began building a company to manufacture Snuggies diapers. I even helped in the design of the original Waddler and the original Overnight diapers. (Not long after the first products were released, a large conglomerate made it clear they did not approve of a name so similar to one of their own products, so the company name was changed to Tykables.)
Once Snuggies had become a reality, I didn't want my fake artwork to be confused with real ads so I stopped making the Snuggies ads. Instead I started a new series called "Version 2.0", which simply means an enhanced version of the original photo. I also began the practice of adding the line "another boring photo fabulously fetishized by vincent vangoo" to each photo to make it clear that it's fake (in case the image is shared more widely than the immediate ABDL community). Now that I'm retired, pasties are still a fun creative outlet for me. I can make puns, write poems, create mini-stories...and I can make people laugh or think or even turn them on with my pasties. It's my secret superpower. -- Vince
